WARRIOR DOWN/CODE DE TELECHARGEMENT INCLUS

Description

"Who is that?" is the first question you’ll have when you see the striking portrait on the cover of WHOOP-Szo’s latest album, *Warrior Down*. “That’s my grandpa,” explains bandleader Adam Sturgeon. “A military man and a residential school survivor,” he adds, letting that serene description hang in the air before discussing what it must have been like for Indigenous men of his grandfather’s generation to be conscripted into the defence of their oppressors. Sturgeon’s experiences as an Anishinaabe Canadian are woven into the songs of *Warrior Down*. We learn more about his grandfather in album closer “Cut Your Hair”; a fragile acoustic rumination on his grandfather’s residential school experience, and the continued resonance of that familial trauma. Fluid in structure and immense in emotional scope, *Warrior Down* offers up a series of dichotomies – light percussions, shimmering softness, driving distortions and acoustic lightness – that give it the dynamism of a creation story. Elemental forces compete and collide even as they search for balance. The driving optimism of “Amaruq” gives way to the rumbling clangor of “Gerry”. The energetic chanting of “Braided Hair” becomes the serene union of “2CB”. The clear and sardonic “6.1 to 6.2” leads into the foreboding and unsparingly self-examining “Oda Man”. Sonically and thematically, *Warrior Down* describes the unfolding of a cultural big-bang, wherein eruptions of truth set off a succession of healthy confrontations. The confrontations embodied in *Warrior Down* take the form of cultural call-outs and personal reflections on identity. The record opens with the frenzy of “Amaruq”. Amaruq is an Inuktitut word meaning “wolf.” It is also the name of a school in Nunavik where Sturgeon and Palm worked in 2012. “Amaruq” is an entry point into discussions about Inuktitut language and multilingualism in Canada, and serves as a dedication to the community that welcomed the band. Following this solidarity with Indigenous Peoples is a jarring disquisition that tells a tragic and true story from Sturgeon’s life. “Gerry” begins with the indelible words: “Well, my cousin Gerry got shot down by a cop.” As Sturgeon was growing up, he shared a deep, brotherly relationship with his cousin Gerry, who gave him his first guitar. Gerry, who moved to Holdfast, Saskatchewan, lived a lonely life, embittered by his family’s history, told throughout the song. It was there that he was shot and killed in his own home by an RCMP officer, in a shocking case of police brutality that has gone uninvestigated to this day. And so the song violently wails: “Warrior in the Saskatchewan city.” This hammering chant transforms into a melancholic reverie of “Braided Hair” (working title: “Missing and Murdered”). On this track, the national crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women is presented as a type of cultural madness: an institutionalized lack of love that impinges on all sense of hope and connection in society. With this song, WHOOP-Szo bears witness to something that goes unspoken, and makes it very, very loud, personalizing and amplifying the experiences of marginalized peoples. “Braided Hair” is an urgent call for accountability and justice. “Oda Man” is a variation on odemin, the Anishinaabe word for strawberry. The strawberry is often referred to as the “heart berry.” It symbolizes connection and forms the basis of teachings about creation and love. Giving it even more depth: Adam is the father of a beautiful little boy named Oda. “Oda Man” is a menacing and fragile machine, examining a version of masculinity that is emotionally cut off next to a version that embraces emotion as a creative force. It is a reclamation of positive masculine values that return to heart teachings and seeks a form of healing that involves resisting impediments to connection, and learning to yield to love. The use of language is an important part of what gives the songs of *Warrior Down* their shape. Reclamation is a recurring theme for WHOOP-Szo, who regularly integrate Anishinaabe words and teachings into their art in order to re-assert aspects of Indigenous culture threatened by the forced fragmentation of families and communities. If listeners translate “Naanan” and “Nshwaaswi”, they will learn that tracks five and eight are titled with… the Anishinaabe words for five and eight. These titles are an invitation to reflect on language and consider the replacement of English numbers with Anishinaabe numbers, which would provide a parallel for the replacement of Indigenous names with Euro-Canadian names that characterized part of the assimilation process in Canada. If listeners research “6.1 – 6.2”, they will eventually discover the concept of “Indian Status”, as laid out in Sections 6 (1) and 6 (2) of the Indian Act, which defines criteria for obtaining a legally recognized Indigenous identity. Whether listeners want to invest in the instructiveness of the songs, or simply sit back and enjoy them, *Warrior Down* delivers. So, who is the warrior of *Warrior Down*? Is it Gerry? His grandfather? Or Adam himself? The answer is not clear. The role of a warrior cannot be filled by one person, nor can the work of warriors be done by any one of us alone. But in *Warrior Down*, WHOOP-Szo’s music reaches out to anyone whose world has been turned upside-down by a new truth; who feels their spirit scrambling to find balance; who realizes it’s a fight to try to lead with love, and tries.